NYT Beta620
Beta620, a new home for experimental online publishing projects from NYT developers and readers; http://eicker.at/NYTbeta620
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Computable Document Format (CDF)
Wolfram has released the Computable Document Format (CDF): bringing interactivity via computation; http://eicker.at/CDF
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Gerrit Eicker
Wolfram: “Today we launched our Computable Document Format, or CDF, to bring documents to life with the power of computation. – CDF binds together and refines lots of technologies and ideas from our last 20+ years into a single standard—knowledge apps, symbolic documents, automation layering, and democratized computation, to name a few. – Disparate though these might appear, they come together in one coherent aim for CDF: connecting authors and readers much better than ever before. … With CDFs we’re broadening this communication pipe with computation-powered interactivity, expanding the document medium’s richness a good deal.”
RWW: “It isn’t simply readers who are meant to benefit from having more interactive publications. Wolfram says that the CDF is also designed to make it easier for authors and publishers to create and incorporate these knowledge apps into documents, arguing that up until now, these sorts of things have often required a knowledge of programming. CDFs can be created using the Mathematica software, and Wolfram insists that building a knowledge app is as easy as writing a macro in Excel.”
O’Reilly: “Wolfram’s tools create documents that can be shared on the Web, and are free for use by people who publish free documents. The tools can be licensed by organizations that charge for documents. Access to the tools can be on the Wolfram site (Software as a Service), or licensed and installed on your own server. – These tools look to me like a boon to educators, and I predict that all manner of publishers in the sciences and social sciences will license them. … Wolfram plans to release the format itself as what they call a ‘public standard.’ This is not the same as an open standard. … I assume Wolfram will keep strict control over the format, which draws a lot from the Mathematica language, and I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Metered Paywalls
Newspapers can tailor their pricing structure rather than use a one size fits all-approach; http://eicker.at/MeteredPaywalls
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Gerrit Eicker
Narrative
Rosen: Making facts public does not a public make, information alone will not inform us; http://eicker.at/Narrative
Gerrit Eicker
Reading Times
Online reading times are heavily changed by web tablets, the iPad in particular; http://eicker.at/ReadingTimes (via @NYTimes)
Gerrit Eicker
Rush of News
Winer: News is episodic. Each story has small value. It is the rush of news. No story is an institution; http://eicker.at/Rush
Gerrit Eicker
The Mongoliad: Future of Book Publishing?
Neal Stephenson may have found the holy grail for the future of book publishing with The Mongoliad; http://eicker.at/Mongoliad
Gerrit Eicker
Beyond the Classical Blog Scheme
Gawker moves beyond the classical blog scheme: scoop, aggregation, personality, visualisation; http://eicker.at/MagStyle
Gerrit Eicker
Times Paywall III.
News Corp: The Times and The Sunday Times have achieved 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date; http://eicker.at/Times
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Gerrit Eicker
News Corp: “News International today announces that the new digital products for The Times and The Sunday Times have achieved more than 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date. – Around half of these are monthly subscribers. These include subscribers to the digital sites as well as subscribers to The Times iPad app and Kindle edition. Many of the rest are either single copy or pay-as-you-go customers. – In addition to the digital-only subscribers, there are 100,000 joint digital/print subscribers who have activated their digital accounts to the websites and/or iPad app since launch. – As a result, the total paid audience for digital products on The Times and The Sunday Times is close to 200,000 (allowing for some duplication in the digital customer sales number).”
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Gerrit Eicker
pC: “From a pre-paywall readership of 20 million unique monthly users, to a base of 105,000 cumulative reader payments in the last four months, The Times has encouraged just 0.5 percent of its online audience at most to pay. – Consider that only half of these subscribe, as opposed to pay per day, and you see that just 0.25 percent of The Times’ online audience have become regular customers. – It sounds ‘disastrous’, as the naysayers would put it. But then, The Times is not operating a freemium service, and it has made a grand, long-term strategic readjustment in its conception of the role of readers between its output and its income – from ‘visitors’ to ‘customers’…”
NYT: “Another question is what effect, if any, the pay walls are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.”
Gerrit Eicker
Future of the Book
Institute for the Future of the Book: The printed page is giving way to networked screens; http://eicker.at/y (via @pfandtasse)
Gerrit Eicker 08:02 on 9. August 2011 Permalink |
NYT: “At The New York Times, our software engineers, journalists, product managers and designers are constantly striving to create new and innovative ways to present news and information and interact with our readers. Yet it’s often difficult to try out new inventions on the world’s largest newspaper Web site. That’s why we created beta620, a new home for experimental projects from Times developers — and a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and new products.”
AdAge: “The New York Times has introduced its long-delayed Beta620, a public beta testing site where web surfers can experiment with new products that could eventually take root on NYTimes.com. … ‘It’s a place that gives a permanent home to the tradition of innovation,’ said Denise Warren, senior VP and chief advertising officer at the New York Times Media Group as well as general manager at NYTimes.com. ‘And it invites our community in to help us formulate an opinion about the innovation and the new products.‘ … The Times’ public beta site has come along just a few weeks after Google said it would wind down its own Google Labs page, which showcases a very wide range of ideas, in an effort to prioritize core products and put ‘more wood behind fewer arrows.’ … The Times believes its public beta site is perhaps different because the projects being tried there bear on its core digital product, The New York Times Online.”
Nieman: “‘It’s all about spurring innovation – coming up with ideas that no one has thought of before, and having a place for them,’ says Marc Frons, the Times’ CTO for digital operations. And not just innovation, but ‘continuous innovation.’ The hope is that, in highlighting experiments as they evolve – and in providing a shared space for shaping their evolution – beta620 will be a place where developers, designers, readers, journalists, and pretty much anyone with an interest in the Times can engage in an ongoing conversation about its future. And about, specifically, the tools that will shape that future. … With beta620, the Times is taking the lessons of end-user innovation and applying them to the process of development, rather than simply the products of it. It’s trying to make experimentation something that’s open and interactive – rather than, Frons says, ‘something that’s cordoned off in the ivory tower.'”
RWW: “The Times has recognized the importance of open data for several years now, and the launch of their API in 2008 was an important step for the struggling news industry, which must now rely on the rest of the Web to make the most of its wealth of data. The Times has put considerable effort into properly categorizing its content for the open Web, and now it has begun to open its software development to the public, too. Some Web citizens have even taken to redesigning NY Times Web products without being asked. – As of now, only NYT developers can display projects on beta620, but the site has set the tone for a public forum on the future of the Times’ technology, so that could certainly change.”
GigaOM: “Can a newspaper think like a startup? New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said on Twitter that the launch of beta620 is a turning point for the newspaper company because it means the media giant now has an ‘openly experimental newsroom.’ In an inaugural post on the new site, meanwhile, NYT staffer Joe Fiore said the company hopes it will become a place where Times developers ‘interact with readers to discuss projects, and incorporate community suggestions into their work.’ … But can a company whose financial status is still less than stellar really devote much time or resources to something like beta620? The New York Times may be a digital leader, but the reality is that the vast majority of its revenue comes from the printed product it has been manufacturing for a century and a half, because that contains the advertising that is its bread and butter – and even though many see the paywall as a success, its contribution to the bottom line remains relatively minuscule. Will the Skimmer or the NYT’s take on instant search make a difference? That seems unlikely.”
pC: “Right now, the projects on Beta620 are submitted by employees only, though anyone can comment on them or provide suggestions for improvement. Eventually, the NYT will open the site up to allow outside individuals and developers to submit their own proposals. At the moment, the best outsiders can do is send along recommendations for what the NYT R&D technology staff should be working on.”